Dawn Tyree, 51, didn’t have much of a childhood.
At 11, she says she was encouraged by her father and step-mother to spend time with a man 19 years her senior.
The man started to “groom” her, she says, giving her adult responsibilities, like driving a car, to make her feel older.
The man impregnated her with her first child at 13. He was 32.
“The solution was marriage,” Tyree tells TODAY.com. “Marriage covers up the rape, the sex abuse and the child endangerment.”
“The marriage saved him from a prison sentence,” she adds, “and essentially put me in a prison.”
In 1985, Tyree finished sixth grade. That summer, she was married.
“As minors, we can’t do anything about it,” Tyree explains. “It was a confusing time. It is brainwashing — call it what it is.”
As recently as 2017, child marriage — what Child USA and UNICEF define as “any formal marriage or informal union between a child under the age of 18 and an adult or another child”— was legal in all 50 states, according to Unchained At Last, an organization dedicated to ending forced and child marriage.
Currently, only seven states ban the practice with no exceptions. One 2021 study found that 300,000 minors under the age of 18 were legally married in the U.S. between 2000 and 2018.
“It would’ve been really nice, if one adult out of the 30 adults in my life might have had the courage to stand up and say something,” Tyree says. “The generation of minding your own business is a thing of the past — we want more for our children.”
‘I was genuinely terrified of giving birth’
At 13 years old, Tyree says she was “afraid of dying during childbirth.”
“Not because anyone had told me it was a possibility,” she adds.”It was because I was genuinely terrified of giving birth.”
Children giving birth face higher risks of eclampsia, puerperal endometritis and systemic infections, according to the World Health Organization. The American Academy of Pediatrics has condemned child marriage, citing increased risk of sexually transmitted infections, early pregnancies and intimate partner violence.
“I was in and out of consciousness when I was giving birth to my first child,” Tyree explains. “I now realize that likely my life was in danger.”
Being a 13-year-old with a husband and a child was “all she knew,” Tyree says, so she tried to “make the most of my circumstances.”
“I learned at 14 that I was pregnant again,” she shares. “It was a hard pill to swallow — it put a little lump in my throat. But I lived through the first birth, so I just reassured myself: ‘You’re going to be OK. You can do this.’ Then I had my daughter.”
Now a mother of two, Tyree says she lived in a “weird limbo” where the adults in her life didn’t “want to engage with her” but also made it clear they “didn’t want me interacting with their children.”
“I can remember these different times during my childhood marriage where I wished that the person who seemed genuinely concerned would’ve asked if I was OK,” she says. “I wish someone would’ve saved us. I wish they would’ve picked up the phone. But the truth is, even if they wanted to, after the marriage there was nothing they could do.”
“It was a legally binding contract,” she adds. “Basically, my husband owned me.”
‘I escaped without a plan’
At 16, Tyree found out she was pregnant for a third time. This time, she says, everything felt different.
“I became concerned about sexual abuse directed towards my children,” she explains. “So after my daughter was born, I began to try to plan a way out. When I became pregnant again, I felt very trapped, so I made the decision to terminate the pregnancy and I escaped without a plan.”
With a 2-year-old and 1-year-old in tow, Tyree went to a women’s shelter — she says she was turned away because she was a minor.
“A social worked…
Read More: Pregnant and married at 13, former ‘child bride’ fights the practice still legal in 43 states